Oracle Blog

The Test Drive: Chhandomay on Sun Product Reviews

Friday Nov 20, 2009

Mapion
Co. Ltd. is Japan's leading provider of online map services with
more than 700,000 page views every day. The company offers the free
Mapion online map search service for driving and public
transportation routes; the fee-based service Mapion Mobile, which
delivers navigation tools and directions to mobile phones; and the
Mapion BB service for broadband users, that smoothly and
instantaneously refreshes as the user navigates around the map.

To remain
competitive, Mapion must
constantly innovate and improve the details in its maps and the
services it provides and needs a stable system with minimal downtime
and scalability to handle a large increase in users, without a
deterioration in response time. In 2008, Mapion had to relocate its
data center because of increasing power consumption needs, and saw
the relocation as an opportunity to start a full-scale upgrade of the
hardware, software, and operating system supporting its map
information services.

Mapion also decided to renew its
customer management system for Mapion Mobile, a system that needed to
be available 24/7. Mapion adopted the MySQL
Cluster Database because it allows for the availability of
existing applications through its 'shared-nothing' distributed
architecture with no single point of failure, to meet Mapion's
mission-critical application requirements of 99.999% availability,
which, coupled with automatic data partitioning with load balancing,
allows almost unlimited database scalability for the company. The new
customer management system for Mapion Mobile went live in January
2009, “with downtime reduced to near zero,” according to
Koji Kozono, who works in the Technology Development Department,
Service Development Group at Mapion.

By standardizing its IT
infrastructure
on a Sun platform, Mapion enjoys unified support from Sun
Spectrum Support that keeps the operation running smoothly while
substantially reducing costs that would arise from resolving
problems. The Sun GlassFish Enterprise server has provided Mapion
with a cost-effective platform for developing and delivering
applications. Yukio Hasehawa, Manager of the Operational Technology
Group, Mapion Technology Development Department, stated that
switching to GlassFish resulted in a substantial reduction in the
operational management workload and said: “It offers easy-to-use
functions which are indispensable in day-to-day operations, including
batch deployment to multiple application servers.”

Wednesday Sep 02, 2009

In 2004, the cities of Monmouth
and
Independence, Oregon founded Monmouth
Independence Network, or MINET, to deliver high-speed Internet,
cable, and VoIP phone services to area businesses and residences, who
were not scheduled to receive broadband services until 2015 or later.
By the end of 2007, MINET needed to expand its IT architecture to
support its growing customer base, and was also looking to offer
additional services on its underutilized network bandwidth to
increase revenue.

The solution was fully deployed in
April 2008 with the new architecture providing 99.99% availability or
higher. Additionally, the virtual environments, Sun blade server
modules, Solaris ZFS, and Open Storage solution have simplified the
provisioning and modification of customer services and helped fuel a
10% growth in customers each month. The solution's small footprint
and energy requirements have also helped MINET save 25% annually on
power, cooling, and space requirements. Phil Garrett, General
Manager of MINET said: “Our large power and cooling savings
translates into more than just money savings, it also gives us more
space that we can use to sell more services and generate additional
revenue.”